A known type of tennis racquet has strings stretched across an open frame to which a handle having a fork neck is attached. The fork-like structure has at least two advantages: it reduces the material and thereby the weight in the neck of the handle, and it reduces the wind resistance that would be the consequence of a substantial amount of wind-resisting material in a wide neck area.
A racquet having a fork-like structure is advantgeous without sacrificing the advantage of the stability that accompanies the wide, flat neck racquet. Accuracy or trueness of the racquet depends on a tangential transition of the neck between the frame and the handle. Where this transition is accomplished by a fork structure, trueness requires that the fork extensions and the frames lie substantially in a common plane with respect to the handle, so that only minimal twisting should be tolerated.
A ball colliding with the strings of the racquet imparts considerable force, and when the ball collides with the racquet at a point remote from the center of the frame, the force of the collision is translated into a twisting moment about the axis of the handle. The moment tends to twist the frame askew from the plane in which the fork structure lies, making the racquet less true. The less true the racquet, the less a tennis player is able to predict the trajectory of a rebounding ball, so that the player finds it difficult to place the ball on the court at a particular location, which is essential to the strategy of a controlled game of tennis.
Control is also is affected by the dimensional stability of the racquet. A player becomes familiar with a handle of a certain length and by whatever twist accompanies it. Consequently, dimensional stability sets the length of the racquet, and this works to another disadvantage: even if it has a standard length handle, a racquet requires considerable space to be either stored or carried in a bag for travel.